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    Title
    The Aesthetics of Disappearance
    Authors and contributors
    By (author) Paul Virilio, Introduction by Jonathan Crary, Translated by Philip Beitchman
    Physical properties
    Format: Paperback
    Number of pages: 128
    Width: 152 mm
    Height: 229 mm
    Thickness: 9 mm
    Weight: 204 g
    Audience
    Professional and scholarly
    General/trade
    College/higher education
    Language
    English
    ISBN
    ISBN 13: 9781584350743
    ISBN 10: 1584350741
    Classifications
    Dewey: 111.85
    BISAC category code: PHI026000
    Nielsen BookScan Product Class: S2.1
    BISAC category code: PHI019000
    BISAC category code: PHI001000
    Edition
    New edition
    Edition statement
    New edition
    Publisher
    AUTONOMEDIA
    Imprint name
    Semiotext (E)
    Publication date
    29 May 2009
    Publication City/Country
    New York/US
    Biographical note
    Paul Virilio was born in 1932 and has published a wide range of books, essays, and interviews grappling with the question of speed and technology, including Speed and Politics, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, and The Accident of Art, all published by Semiotext(e). Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. A founding editor of Zone Books, he is the author of Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1990) and coeditor of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992). He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
    Main description
    Virilio himself referred to his 1980 work The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a "juncture" in his thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the logistics of perception—a logistics he would soon come to refer to as the "vision machine." If Speed and Politics established Virilio as the inaugural—and still consummate—theorist of "dromology" (the theory of speed and the society it defines), The Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy"—the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it. Speed and Politics defined the society of speed; The Aesthetics of Disappearance defines what it feels like to live in the society of speed."I always write with images," Virilio has claimed, and this statement is nowhere better illustrated than with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Moving from the movie theater to the freeway, and from Craig Breedlove's attainment of terrifying speed in a rocket-power car to the immobility of Howard Hughes in his dark room atop the Desert Inn, Virilio himself jump cuts from such disparate reference points as Fred Astaire, Franz Liszt, and Adolf Loos to Dostoyevsky, Paul Morand, and Aldous Huxley. In its extension of the "aesthetics of disappearance" to war, film, and politics, this book paved the way to Virilio's follow-up: the celebrated study, War and Cinema.This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Crary, one of the leading theorists of modern visual culture.Foreign Agents seriesDistributed for Semiotext(e)